We have a tie today between “journalistic ethics” and “judicial ethics.”

In this post on “Contentions,” the Commentary blog, Alana Goodman tells how 25 Gannett Wisconsin Media journalists, including seven at the Green Bay Press-Gazette violated Gannett’s journalistic ethics standards by signing the recall petition against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. This interesting tidbit of information came to light after the paper ran a story relating how some two dozen Wisconsin judges violated judicial standards of conduct by signing the recall petition.

But really, all of these people are progressives, so why are we talking about something as fifteen-minutes-ago as ethics? All that matters is results—correct, comrades?

You know what the uproar over the Zimmerman/Martin shooting down in Florida is beginning to remind me of? The Duke Lacrosse scandal.

In the Duke case, the quasi-official storyline was quickly established: a bunch of rich white college boys raped a black exotic dancer. It was a storyline that flattered the preconceived notions and ideological prejudices of Duke’s progressive faculty and the mainstream media. The former was soon in full cry against its own students, while the latter’s coverage of the case was, with a few honorable exceptions, disgracefully slipshod. But what the hell? Everybody knew what happened!

There was just one little problem: the storyline was false.

A crack whore, an unscrupulous prosecutor, a mob of unprincipled academics and a bunch of lazy reporters almost succeeded in ruining the lives of a small group of Duke students who, because they happened to be white and came from privileged backgrounds, were declared guilty in what passes nowadays for the court of public opinion. Fortunately for them, their families could afford good legal representation, and the case against them was soon shown to be a fabrication. The Duke faculty members who smeared these students have not, to date, apologized for their despicable behavior—not that I’d expect people like that to have a conscience or a sense of shame. It sometimes seems to me that the price of academic tenure is the surrender of one’s soul.

George Zimmerman doesn’t come from a highly privileged background, so the instant rush to judgment that followed his shooting of Trayvon Martin is even more dangerous to him than it was to the Duke students. Zimmerman has been castigated as a racist and a murderer. Lots of people just want to see him destroyed—because the person he killed was a black teenager. All this despite the fact that he appears on the available evidence to have acted in self-defense.

And of course, our insufferable philosopher has stuck his oar in, commanding his loyal subjects to search their souls. (For what he didn’t say.) Can’t the man ever keep his mouth shut?

As the story notes, a combination of declining demand (alas, mostly due to the weak economy) and increased domestic production has dramatically reduced the amount of oil being imported by the United States: from 60% of total consumption in 2005 to 45% today. Moreover, the US has become a net exporter of refined petroleum products.

This turnaround is largely due to policies enacted by the Bush Administration, and President Obama can claim scant credit for it. Where he has the power to do so, the President is done everything possible to stifle domestic oil production. The current boom in production results from oil being pumped on land where the Administration’s writ does not run. Nevertheless, the scale of this increase in production since 2005 shows what would be possible if the United States had a rational energy policy. This country could eventually produce as many as 10 million barrels of oil per day, making America an energy powerhouse to rival Saudi Arabia—and, not incidentally, creating millions of jobs.

The NYT rightly notes that practical energy independence would transform the nation’s national security posture. Though the US could never remain perfectly indifferent to events in the Middle East, energy independence would provide the leverage to make allies like Japan and the European nations, who are much more dependent on oil from that source, to take more responsibility for the stability of the region. It would also give the US much greater influence over oil prices, while rendering the country immune to oil embargos.

This is good news indeed, and it’s a measure of the Obama Administration’s political incompetence that in an election years, it can plausibly be portrayed by critics as a major pothole on the road to American energy independence.

Thomas Buch-Andersen, host of the Danish TV show Detektor, mocked President Obama's political rhetoric in a recent episode. "Obama used a metaphor from boxing to explain Denmark's role in the world," says Buch-Andersen, introducing the segment.

He then roles the tape. "That's fairly typical of the way that Danes have punched above their weight in international affairs," President Obama says at a press availability in the Oval Office with Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt of Denmark.

"It's nice to be praised," Buch-Andersen remarks. "We punch harder than our weight class would suggest. But how much should we read into his words? According to Obama, are we doing any better than, say, the Norwegians?"

The TV host again turns to the tape, this time showing President Obama in the Oval Office with Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg. "I've said this before, but I want to repeat: Norway punches above its weight," Obama says.

Back to Buch-Andersen. "Hmm. So Norway packs a punch too. But what about the Netherlands? Here, their head of government, Mark Rutte, visits Obama."

I see that once again, President Obama was unable to restrain himself. He jumped into the middle of the uproar over the shooting of a black teenager in Florida by a Neighborhood Watch volunteer, opining that if he had a son, the kid might look just like the victim.

Leaving aside the point that Obama’s comment could be considered an example of racial stereotyping, what interests me about this incident is the fact that it’s actually a minority-on-minority shooting. The victim, Trayvon Martin, was black and the shooter, George Zimmerman, is Hispanic. Yet you will notice that in the story I cite here, Zimmerman is identified as a “white Hispanic.” When’s the last time you heard that phrase in a news story?

For a decade or more we’ve been told that whites are becoming a minority in America, primarily due to the explosive growth of the Hispanic population. Yet now it seems that some Hispanics, if their skin is pale enough, are being demoted to the ranks of white racism. I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to get confused!

A lesson in basic economics for our philosopher-president: If you make something less expensive, people will use more of it. For example, if you make cars, SUVs, trucks etc. more fuel efficient, thus in effect making gas less expensive, people will drive more. It’s impossible, therefore, to “save energy” via incremental improvements in fuel efficiency. Got that, Barry?

In a development that'll save French taxpayers a good deal of money, Islamofascist terrorist and child murderer Mohammed Merah was killed yesterday in a firefight with a French police SWAT team. Merah was dispatched by a bullet in the head when the SWAT team stormed his apartment. Three French police officers were wounded in the shootout, one seriously.

French officials say that Merah was trained by Al Qaeda terrorists in Pakistani Waziristan, a terrorist stronghold.

Too bad for progressives that he was killed. I'm sure they were looking forward to his trial, as an opportunity to shed crocodile tears over this "alienated second-generation immigrant" and denounce the evils of Western imperialism.

As I expected, the gunman who murdered three French soldiers recently returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, three Jewish children and a rabbi has turned out to be an Islamofascist terrorist.

Mohammed Merah is a French national of Algerian origin. He has spent at least a couple of years in Afghanistan and Pakistan. French government sources say that he’s been under police surveillance for some time—good job there, guys.

What I found particularly interesting about this story was the media’s reflexive attempt to pooh-pooh a Muslim connection. Instead of doing the responsible thing—refraining from speculation in the absence of facts—the press immediately began to speculate that the killings were the work of a neo-Nazi assassin. That there was no evidence to support this notion, and considerable reason to think that the shooter was probably a Muslim, mattered not at all.

There was also this note of macabre hilarity:

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad strongly rejected using his people as a justification for the French killings, calling them a "cowardly terrorist attack."

"It is time for those criminals to stop exploiting the name of Palestine through their terrorist actions," Fayyad said in a statement.

Pretty cheeky, considering the source!

And finally, there’s this prize specimen of journalistic buffoonery from the (UK) Telegraph’s Ed West:

It’s easy to get it wrong because so many of the world’s varied extremists, whatever their motivation and however much they might hate each other, focus their anger and loathing on similar targets—the state, the city, modernity, capitalism, and the one group who embody all these complicating, unsettling changes in the minds of lonely, failed young men—Jews. People often make the wrong call because that’s what they want to believe, because it fits into their narrative. The recent shootings in Toulouse are a case in point. Many people kill in the name of jihad but they do not represent Islam or Muslims, the vast majority of whom will be horrified by the Toulouse killings. It is not religion that turns some young Muslim men in the West violent, but the sense of alienation and frustration that inevitably comes from being a second-generation immigrant.

Oh, baloney. To be rudely frank, I don’t believe that “the vast majority” of Muslims will be “horrified” by the killing of Jews. Since when, Ed?

As of today, the Obama super PAC (run by former Obama adviser Bill Burton) has still not returned the $1 million donation it received from the loathsome misogynist, Bill Maher. Well, ladies, it does seem that the President's concern for your honor and dignity is somewhat selective. If you're a woman of conservative views, it's quite all right with Obama for a slimeball like Maher to call you a "dumb twat." Hey, he's got a million reasons to look the other way.

Here’s a stinging takedown of President Obama’s self-serving claim that he inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression. No so, explains Commentary’s Peter Wehner:

[At the time of the 1980 election] Prime interest rates were around 19 percent. Inflation was in double digits, with forecasts that food prices would rise by more than 10 percent in the coming year and energy prices by 20-40 percent. Unemployment stood at 7.4 percent (it would eventually rise to 10.8 percent in the early years of Reagan’s presidency). Housing starts were in free fall. And auto sales were down 10 percent from the previous year.

In short, though it’s true that Obama inherited a lot of problems, they were by no means the worst ever faced by an incoming president. Moreover, as Wehner goes on to note, while Reagan had to deal with problems caused by his political opponents, Obama’s were of his own party’s making:

[I]n the words of AEI’s Peter Wallison, the “sine qua non of the financial crisis was U.S. government housing policy”—and that “far from being a marginal player, Fannie Mae was the source of the decline in mortgage underwriting standards that eventually brought down the financial system.”

Would it be too indecorous to point out that the Bush administration warned as early as April 2001 that Fannie and Freddie were too large and overleveraged and that their failure “could cause strong repercussions in financial markets, affecting federally insured entities and economic activity” well beyond housing?

In fact, President Bush’s plan for reform would have subjected Fannie and Freddie to the kinds of federal regulation that banks, credit unions, and savings and loans have to comply with. In addition, Republican Richard Shelby, then chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, pushed for comprehensive GSE (government-sponsored enterprises) reform in 2005. And who blocked these efforts at reforming Fannie and Freddie? Democrats such as Senator Christopher Dodd and Representative Barney Frank, along with the then-junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, who backed Dodd’s threat of a filibuster (Obama was the third-largest recipient of campaign gifts from Fannie and Freddie employees in 2004).

So when Obama speaks, as he so often does, of “the failed policies of the past” that got us into this mess, he’s talking about policies that he wholeheartedly supported back in the years before the deluge. It’s an all-too-typical example of this president’s casual, not say dismissive, attitude toward the facts.